I believe that we are at heart a people of high ideals. Critics have said of us that our finer sensibilities have been blunted by our extraordinary commercial success, that our earlier ideals have been lost sight of in the business of growing rich, that we prefer the dollar mark to the laurel wreath. It is true that we have drunk too deeply of material success, but, thank God, we have come to our senses before it is too late! We are our true selves once again. We have shown that the altruism which caused us to go to war with Spain that Cuba might be free, which led us to pay for the Philippines, already ours by force of arms, which induced us to return the Boxer indemnity to China, still guides our actions. We have not entered upon this war to avenge our murdered citizens; we have not gone into it for territorial aggrandizement or trade expansion, we have not gone into it to pay our debt to France; we have gone to war from the most unselfish motive that ever actuated a nation--the desire to serve mankind. Our victory--for we never have and we never will enter upon a losing war--will be a victory of morality and right and will assure to all our children a world in which they can live in peace and happiness. We have been charged with being France-mad. Yet, when you stop to think about it, there is nothing strange in our attachment for the French. We are both idealistic and intensely sentimental peoples. The name of France is indissolubly linked with the early history of this country. The first religion, the first education, the first attempts at government, and the first settlement of that vast middle region which stretches from the Great Lakes to the Gulf were French, and French influence has extended over its entire existence. A son of France, Jacques Cartier, was the first European to step beyond the threshold of the unguessed continent. Our mightiest river was first explored throughout its length by a Frenchman, and the people who dwell to-day upon the lands it waters are geographical descendants of France. At the mouth of this river the metropolis of the South is named after a city in France; a thousand miles upstream another busy city keeps on the lips of thousands the name of a French king; while, still farther to the north, yet a third great hive of industry is named for the _détroit_ on which it stands, though the Frenchman who gave it its name would not understand our pronunciation of it. Such was the domain which France conquered for Civilization. Our national capital was planned by a Frenchman, and to the vision of another Frenchman we owe the waterway which links the oceans at Panama. The debt of America to France, though more direct, is no less obvious than France’s debt to America, for the American Revolution inspired the French Revolution, and the spectacle of a free America under Washington’s administration proved a continual stimulus to the French in their own struggle for freedom. It is this